Backlink Count vs Page Count

[bankrolls]

A website I am working on has 120 pages. I sit on page 5 for nearly all terms, with 3k backlinks a solid PR5, Wordpress Platform, and site age of 1 year. The domain is 4 years old, but im pretty sure google knows when a new website is placed on a domain name.

Heres the issue I am facing; competitors with enormous backlink profiles. Positions #2 - #15 all have at least 1k backlinks, and the top 5 have over 10k. These are nothing websites, 7 pages at most with enormous amounts of blog backlinks that are obviously purchased.

The website holding position #1 (pr2) for all my 7 primary keywords has only 700 backlinks, less than all the competition. The website does however have over 2k pages, and is over 5 years old.

So, my question is do you think the #1 spot is holding due to its AGE, or NUMBER OF PAGES? Post your thoughts and explain why you believe what you do.

I am considering ordering a 500 article package from that 99cent guy on this forum but before I do give me some feedback. How important is the size of a website?

Obviously putting original content on my site is much more white hat than buying crappy links like my competitors are. I have ranked this website completely white hat, and did not want to go the link buying route. However to play on page one it looks like I might be forced to.

What do YOU think? Buy links, or add content?

[bankrolls]

budump budump budump

[AndyBlackSEO]

Yes. It will be ranking so highly due to ALL of those factors. Domain age, number of indexed pages and backlinks all go towards a top ranking.

Just keep adding content and keep building backlinks. See where they have got some of their links and see if you can get links from there too.

It a case of plugging away at it on a consistant basis.

[mark135]

i'm guessing that the niche your in is dog training..........

[zoobie]

keep building links and contents... how long have you done this SEO stuff? and how competitive is your keywords? SEO does require some patients but I am sure if you are going to get quality links, that is getting links from relevant websites, then surely your effort will be paid off at last.

[jasonmorgan]

Everything you mentioned has an impact on ranking.

you mentioned that the top site has 700 backlinks while some of the others have 1k+, something to look at are duplicate domains in the backlinks.

You'll see sites that have thousands of backlinks but when you break them down it's really thousands of backlinks coming from hundreds of sites which isn't going to have the same amount of backlink juice as thousands of backlinks coming from thousands of different sites... IP diversity is a good thing. The more diverse the sources of your backlinks the better.

As for the rest of it, domain age, backlink age, amount of quality content, all of it plays a part in the ranking algorithm.

In your situation, you have the backlinks, page rank and domain age so I'd suggest trying to get some backlinks from the sites that rank ahead of you.

You could continue to blindly build backlinks to win the backlinks arms race but getting some backlinks from the sites ranking ahead of you may boost your authority and ranking faster and require less work.